results with checkMesh...please comment
 

I have made a mesh in blockMesh after a long struggle. But now i am not able to run any kind of solver run with it. COmpressible, imcompressible, laminar, turbulent, inviscid, p-based, rho-based...nthing seems to work. Everytime i get huge negative pressures, huge courant numbers and divergence no matter what BC or solver setting i use.

So i am wondering is is because of the mesh??? Now my mesh is pretty coarse, no refinment at all. nice hex mesh, with only one problem, that i had to do mergepatchpairs and which gives some distorted cells.

This is the output of checkMesh:
As you can see, i got 8 skew cells but max skewness is about 6. what this number 5.59 in checkmesh signifies??? What value is good?? (in Gambit 0.85 for hex is considered all right.)


And please give me some comment, that whether these few bad cells can be the nemesis of my simulation??? Should i think of remeshing??

Please help. I am already frustrated a lot:mad::mad:..

Hi

I would definitely re-mesh.

And if I were you I would isolate the bad cells using

foamToVTK -faceSet highAspectRatioCells (or cellSet cant remember)
foamToVTK -faceSet skewFaces

Open your original mesh and the the vtk files and highlight the vtk ones and see what aspects of your geometry creates the bad cells.
I've had similar problems where it turned out to be two edges lying very close to one another making it useless for any kind of solving, even though it was only 4 cells. Also an aspect ratio of 1600 is insane, this means you have a cell 1600 times longer than it is high/wide (correct me if I'm wrong).

you definitely have to get rid of the high aspect ratio cells and I would say with regards to skewness that if you want reliable/stable results I would stay below 2. I never have issues when I keep it in that range. Again you could go higher, but some care have to taken with regards to limiters/relaxation in fvSchemes and fvSolution

Hope this is useful in any way.

Hello Niels,

Thanx for the reply. It is helpful indeed. I m new to OF and i really want to get grip on it. And every bit of info is welcomed from me.:)

Well you are right about Aspect ratio (i read somewhere that OF does not accept cells with AR more than 1000, is that right???). I managed to get reed of them.

And your clue on locating bad cells is really helpful. I am actually trying to mesh a geometry in which two small pipes join one big cylinder. I could not mesh it using blockmesh by simple block decomposition so had to use "mergepatchpairs". This is giving those bad skewed cells. Please see the pictures attached. I have thought of a way to eliminate use of this "mergepatchpair" so i wont get these bad cells. Still out of curiosity, i would like to know is there any better way of doing this?? or may be using "mergepatchpair" in better way?? i tried to use fine mesh around the merged patches but it only makes situation bad. Any suggestion or guideline would be much appreciated.

One more question, if i may trouble you some more. How skewness is measured?? As far as i remember, in Fluent it ranges between 0 to 1. But in OF it can go more than 1 so certainly there is a difference in OF the way skewness is calculated. (The definition i know is something like this: skewness = max[ (90-anglemax)/90 , 90/(90-anglemin)] I remember it vaguely. This will give value bet 0 to 1)

Thank you very much for your help..Have a nice day..:)

Just for the record: aspect ratios of more than 1000 is by no means insane - we have it in airfoil aerodynamics all the time - and on wind turbine blades.

Aspect ratios of 1e5 or even higher is usual business when you want to have a first cell height of around 1e-6 chordLengths. checkMesh reports a problem with this, and I don't know how sensitive the OpenFOAM solver is to this (I am investigating that), but all (other) major CFD codes eats those bad aspect ratios with a smile.

/Mads

i'm not sure if i'm right here, but since this is almost exactly the problem i have, i didn't want to open a new thread.
i also have similar outputs for checkMesh and my courant number explodes and it actually gives out 'nan' for it.

check Mesh tells me following:
also, when i try
it tells me this
i already also checked
which gave me these images
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/6...orthofaces.png

http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/5...entedfaces.png

according to the images, all my faces are wrong orientated, which i really don't know how that could happen.
i really don't know what to think of them. they don't look bad at all. especially since i tried to keep the aspect ratio around 1.
interessting is as well, that the same mesh works for a different scale (when i mesh it smaller...)

are there any suggestions what best to do??


thanks in advance
conny

My guess would be...you have defined the hex blocks incorrectly..e.g. if correct hex block is (1 2 3 1 4 5 6 4) you might have done (1 2 3 1 5 4 6 5) or something like that..the wrongly oriented faces and the aspect ratio of e+197 suggest this thing..check your hex blocks...

i figured it out. it was none of that. for some reason i changed convert to meters from 0.001 to 1 and changed my vertices, so that the numbers still have the same scale. i ended up without problems.
thanks anyways!

I have similar problem
Checking geometry...
Overall domain bounding box (-20 -10 0) (20 10 1)
Mesh has 3 geometric (non-empty/wedge) directions (1 1 1)
Mesh has 3 solution (non-empty) directions (1 1 1)
Boundary openness (4.73602e-19 2.64556e-19 -2.74382e-17) OK.
***High aspect ratio cells found, Max aspect ratio: 10180.4, number of cells 24
<<Writing 24 cells with high aspect ratio to set highAspectRatioCells
Minimum face area = 1.1966e-05. Maximum face area = 2.42745. Face area magnitudes OK.
Min volume = 5.62067e-07. Max volume = 0.682058. Total volume = 642.966. Cell volumes OK.
Mesh non-orthogonality Max: 89.9812 average: 26.9749
*Number of severely non-orthogonal (> 70 degrees) faces: 353.
Non-orthogonality check OK.
<<Writing 353 non-orthogonal faces to set nonOrthoFaces
Face pyramids OK.
***Max skewness = 5.3958, 12 highly skew faces detected which may impair the quality of the results
<<Writing 12 skew faces to set skewFaces
Coupled point location match (average 0) OK.

Failed 2 mesh checks.


\I have made a mesh in blockMesh after a long struggle. But now i am not able to run any kind of solver run with it. COmpressible, imcompressible, laminar, turbulent, inviscid, p-based, rho-based...nthing seems to work. Everytime i get huge negative pressures, huge courant numbers and divergence no matter what BC or solver setting i use.

So i am wondering is is because of the mesh??? Now my mesh is pretty coarse, no refinment at all. nice hex mesh, with only one problem, that i had to do mergepatchpairs and which gives some distorted cells.

This is the output of checkMesh:
As you can see, i got 8 skew cells but max skewness is about 6. what this number 5.59 in checkmesh signifies??? What value is good?? (in Gambit 0.85 for hex is considered all right.)


And please give me some comment, that whether these few bad cells can be the nemesis of my simulation??? Should i think of remeshing??

Please help. I am already frustrated a lot:mad::mad:..[/QUOTE]

Hey guys,

Great tips here. Makes sense.
My paraView shut down for some reason when I tried to open my new VTK files.

Any thoughts?